For science, for soul, and for success, you've been listening to The Sweet Spot. Welcome back, Sweet Spotter. Welcome back to the final episode in our series Break the Barrier. This is episode 7 of 7 on Slow Down Sunday, where we're gonna take stillness, surrender, silence, solitude, and the solar system and figure it out. Figure it all out. We're just gonna figure it out. I'm Dr. Derek Sweet, I'm your host here on The Sweet Spot. It's been my joy, my absolute privilege to work alongside you, to walk alongside you, to sit with you, sweet spotters, as we unpacked breaking through barriers. Take a breath with me. In through the nose and a slow exhale out through the mouth. Not the shallow kind of breathing. We're gonna try that one more time. Because when you take an inhale all the way in, down into the diaphragm area, and then you let it out slowly with a really slow exhale that's longer than the inhale, you are slowing down your breathing. And in so doing, you are resetting your nervous system, you're sending a message to your vagus nerve, the longest nerve in the body, and you're telling yourself, hey, it's gonna be okay, it's gonna be good. This is good for you. So when you take a breath with me, a real one, you're not you're not wasting time. You are resetting, recalibrating, and refreshing, like we talked about yesterday. If you didn't hear self-care Saturday yesterday, there's still time. There's still time. So as we close out this series, this wonderful series we've been doing on Break the Barrier. Look, I just want to remind you, you showed up on Monday, you faced turbulence and you didn't flinch. Tuesday, you rewrote the internal code that had been running your decisions without permission. On Wednesday, you walked into resistance and held your composure when everything around you said react. On Trust Yourself Thursday, you learned to trust the signal underneath that noise. And Friday, you pushed through the finish line when your body and your mind wanted to quit. Yesterday, you learned that rest isn't the opposite of breaking barriers, it's what makes the barriers stay broken. And now here we are, beautiful souls. Sunday, the final episode, the capstone. And I'm gonna do something different today. I'm not gonna push you forward, I'm not gonna invite you upward. Today we're gonna talk about five things: stillness, surrender, silence, solitude, and the solar system. And by the end of this episode, I want you to understand something that might change not just your week, but your entire orientation to life. Yeah, you're not fighting the universe, you're part of it. And when you slow down enough to feel that, really feel what I'm saying, the barriers we've been talking about, they don't just break, they dissolve, they dissolve. That's right, the barriers dissolve. How about that? How about that? Tell me how would that feel to you if you slow down enough and the barriers resolved and dissolved. Does that feel good? I bet it does, because it feels good to me too, just to take that time and to allow it to sink in. Yeah, you're not fighting the universe, you're part of it, and when you slow down enough to feel it, those barriers they dissipate. Let me start with a question that's going to feel strange to you. When okay, you're gonna like this one. When was the last time you looked at the stars? Not on a screen saver, that doesn't count, or a photo, that doesn't count. I mean the actual sky. When was the last time you stood outside at night or looked out through your window and let the stars make you feel small? Alright, sometimes you might say, some people might be telling me, Well, I don't got stars where I am, you know. You know, I live in the city, we don't see stars. Alright, make it the sky, all right? Yeah, when did when was the last time you stood outside at night or uh during at some point in the day and let yourself feel small under the big sky? Because here's what's wild. Most of us spend our entire lives trying to feel big, important, and significant and to matter. We hustle for visible for visibility, right? We we grind for recognition, we we break barriers so that the world will notice us, and none of that is wrong. That's all okay. Nothing wrong with being noticed. That's why you put on those clothes today. So look. The perspective though changes when you look up at the sky. Something happens when you look up at that night sky, and you realize you're standing on a rock that's spinning at a thousand miles an hour, orbiting a star at 67,000 miles per hour inside a galaxy that contains 200 billion other stars, and that galaxy is just one of two trillion galaxies in the observable universe. That's a whole lot of math to say that we're pretty small here on this earth. Yeah, when you get that perspective of where we fit in this massive universe or multiverse, something shifts. I'm not saying your problems disappear, but they resize. I'm not saying the barriers vanish, but they stop feeling permanent, right? And for the first time all week, maybe all month, maybe all year, we can exhale. We're not giving up. We're you know, it's because we're remembering something that we forgot. We're a part of something so big. We've been fearfully and wonderfully made, but it's a huge universe. This is this, it's so much bigger than what we have to do today. It's so much bigger than what we're facing, it's so much bigger than what we're dealing with, even though what we're carrying does feel big to us. When you zoom out and you go up a trillion miles up, or we're a speck. And this is what the science gets really beautifully because the universe isn't just big, it's rhythmic, and your body knows that. So, deep inside your brain, I'm gonna get geeky for one second. Deep inside your brain, just behind the bridge of your nose, sits a structure that regulates so much of our lives. It's called the SCN, the superchismatic nucleus. It's about the size of a grain of rice, tiny, and it is the master clock of your and my entire body, the suprachismatic nucleus. Every cell in your body has its own internal clock. Your liver, your heart, your lungs, your skin. They all keep time, but it is the SCN, the suprachismatic nucleus, that's the master conductor. And what does it take? What does it take for this thing to work? Where do you think it's getting its cue from? Light. Yes, specifically the light of the sun. Absolutely, sweet spotter. When sunlight enters your and my eyes in the morning, it's hitting these specialized receptors in the retina that send a signal directly to this SCN, this supracosmatic nucleus. And then this SCN tells the entire body, it tells your body, hey, it's time to wake up, it's time to release cortisol, it's time to activate. You've heard of melatonin, it's not just a supplement, it's something you produce, it's a hormone you produce in your body. It tells your body it's time to slow down, it's time to repair, it's time to sleep. All controlled by the universe, light and dark. How amazing is that that you have this SCM thing in you that we have it in us? This system called the circadian rhythm is not a preference. This is not some kind of a lifestyle choice that we're making here. This is four billion years of evolution written into your biology. It's the earliest organisms on earth, the single-celled life, ancient ocean organisms, already had light-sensitive rhythms. Before there were brains, before there were even eyes, before there was anything we would even call consciousness, life was already synchronized with the turning of the planet. You and I built for rhythm, day and night, effort and rest, output and silence, up and down, left and right. You know, just think about it. It's not just good advice, it's it's your biology, it's your cosmic design, and and here's the problem. Here's the real problem. It was simple back then, right? You got up in the morning, the light was up, you went to bed, it was dark, you farmed, whatever. That's that's that's that's not what's happening anymore. We've broken that rhythm. Artificial light. We I live in a city that never sleeps, okay? Just artificial light, blue screens at midnight, notifications that are arriving at 2 a.m. TVs that are on all the time, work emails that are arriving before sunrise. We've disconnected ourselves from the very cycle that our bodies were designed to follow. The body is simple, it knows when it's light and dark and it puts you to sleep and wakes you up based on that. But we have reversed everything because we control artificial light. And then we wonder why we're anxious, we wonder why we can't sleep, why we feel burned out after a vacation. It's not because we were weak or anything, we're just we're misaligned. We're fighting the rhythm instead of flowing with the rhythm. That's all. And that's why we called Sunday here on the sweet sot slow down sundae. Slow down Sunday, not just a nice idea. Slow down Sunday is a is a really intentional idea of biological realignment with the way the universe actually works.

Yeah.

So these pillars that I'm talking about, um, stillness, and I'll do them one by one. Stillness, stillness is not the absence of movement, it's the presence of alignment. All week long we've been moving, breaking through, pushing forward, executing under pressure. You know what you've been doing all week. All of it was necessary. Getting the job done, getting in the car, getting on the train, getting on the bus, getting to work, but not being still. No chance for neural replay, like we talked about yesterday, where your brain can consolidate new patterns. There's so little time to rest. But stillness is where the architecture, the memory, all of it gets built. When your body is still, when you stop scrolling, you stop planning, you stop executing, you allow your nervous system to reset. And your default mode network starts to calm down. Yeah. So that's the idea of surrendering to the moment, of being silent, of allowing stillness to come in. Because if you allow silence to enter your stillness and your surrender moment, it's not empty. Silence is not empty, it's actually full, and the universe has been teaching this lesson since humans existed. In Psalm 19, in the ancient wisdom, it says the heavens declare the glory of God, the skies proclaim the work of his hands, right? Day after day they pour forth speech, and night after night they reveal knowledge. They have no speech, they use no words, no sound is heard from them, yet their voice goes out. Wow, into all the earth. Wow, listen to that. The heavens are speaking, day after day and night after night, are speaking to us, and yet no sound is heard. The universe is always speaking. That's a line, right? That we always talk about. Those who hang with me know we always say that the universe is always speaking. The universe communicates through rhythm, it doesn't communicate through noise, it communicates through cycles, not announcements. And through the very silent turning of the planets, the wordless rising of tides, the quiet rotation that gives us dawn and dusk, we learn something. That's where our deepest knowing comes from. All week, we've talked about the signal under the noise. All week we've talked about barriers. And there's been a barrier that has been constructed that doesn't allow us to experience solitude anymore. I'm not talking about loneliness, I'm just talking about the practice of being reconnected with ourselves. Yeah. All week we've been in busyness with our barriers, with our audiences, with our obligations, with the voices in our head, with the pressures of performance. And every one of those things matters. I'm not saying anything is wrong, it's just that they really do take over. And solitude is hard to find. Solitude just says, hey, you don't have to be anything right now. You don't have to perform, you don't have to produce, you don't have to respond. You just you just get to exit and chill. And in that time you can be repaired. You know, the neuroscience shows that solitude, genuine chosen, unstructured solitude, reduces the activity of the brain's monitoring networks. It calms the brain down, the brain quiets down. And when they do, the creative and integrative work of the networks in the brain actually light up. Some of the greatest breakthroughs in history come not just from my mom, who tells me that she sleeps and she gets great ideas in the morning. And boy, that's so true. But some of the greatest breakthroughs in history come not from grinding harder, but from walking and taking it easy by yourself alone. You know, Darwin did this, Charles Darwin, Einstein did this, Beethoven did this. They were uh masters of being in solitude. Even Jesus in the Word and the ancient wisdom took back roads and found time to be alone. Isolated. Today, it's slow down Sunday. How about giving yourself some permission to be alone with the universe? Not lonely. I don't want you to be isolated or anything like that. Just alone, just be intentionally alone for even if it's just like 20 minutes, just let your brain stop performing for an audience, stop doing something, just be. Just be. And if you can do that, you can do nothing. You might just accomplish everything that you're seeking to do. Sometimes your performance needs this reset where you unplug so that when you get plugged back in, you're ready to go. Listen, tomorrow is Making Moves Monday. We're gonna be in a whole new series. Absolutely, we will. So reset today, recalibrate today, refresh yourself today, slow down, and I'll see you tomorrow. This is Dr. Derek Sweet, and you're listening to the sweet spot for science, for soul, and for success. Subscribe and share.